Jeff Epler's blog

About me

I've been a computer programmer since I first started typing in program
listings on a Commodore Vic 20 when I was about 8. My hobbies include
electronics, CNC manufacturing, photography, beer and winemaking.

I live with my wife, cat, and lots of left-over parts from unfinished
projects in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.

It remains unclear to me whether effective quantum computing -- which I think of as something that can implement algorithms like Grover's and Shor's -- is a mere matter of engineering, or whether it requires one or more scientific breakthroughs. So many companies doing public-facing research in the area act like it's the former, but authors like Mikhail Dyakonov who know much more than me act like it's the latter. The thing about scientific breakthroughs is that it's hard to put timelines on them; the hoped-for breakthrough might never come.

As bad as C/C++ can be, particularly for systems that have to be secure in the face of untrusted input, it's simply not financially possible for companies to transition their legacy systems to anything else. Take some random and unnamed commercial codebase for example -- while 'sloccount' isn't the Word of God, here's a big application that it says would cost just north of $100 million to write from scratch. But it also depends on any number of file format libraries; just one of them, sloccount reports, is $43 million in its own right. There are maybe 3 or 4 such libraries, and they're all in C++. And then there's the one that the company buys in binary-only form, so you're stuck into a single C++ ABI unless you fork over a 5- or 6-digit quantity of money for a fresh build with a different toolchain! You simply can't rewrite this in rust or other "safe" language, not even your core codebase. You also have to grow 5 or 6 people who are such domain experts that they can write, from scratch, file format libraries for formats where the (complicated × niche) product is huge. And again, whole 'sloccount' is not the word of god, it might say your schedule for just the two subtasks above is 10 years for a staff of 100, which already dwarfs your current development staff. May the address-space layout randomizer have mercy on us all.

The Gaia spacecraft is pretty amazing. Run a gigapixel camera, in space, for 5 years and somehow get the data on billions of stars home on a mere 3Mbit/s link. "only a few dozen pixels around each object can be downlinked". The in-space processing must be pretty sophisticated and high performance.

"[T]here’s the AI trained to identify toxic and edible mushrooms, which simply picked up on the fact that it was presented with the two types in alternating order. This ended up being an unreliable model in the real world."

I thoroughly disagree with the author's assertion of the equal epistemic(?) status of the two fields "date of birth" and "sex/gender" of a birth certificate. I am at home with a world where a 5-second or even 50-year investigation of the shape of a body can't accurately reveal this (once assumed to be objective and unchanging) characteristic. Just think of it like pronouncing a baby a habitual criminal based on the debunked science of phrenology! On the other hand, the truth of passing days and years seems just about as objective as anything; and find nothing particularly sinister in the way we codify it into a civil calendar which in turn enables legal contracts like "the term of the lease shall be 12 months from November 8, 2018". Hopefully we some day arrive in a world where even if there's some reason to write down quick notes on the shape of baby genitals (one weird trick for telling babies apart with ~P(0.5)!), nobody insists on printing anything about it on our everyday ID cards, or imagines it should inform our use of pronouns or whether we should prefer white wine or lite beer.

at a first guess I'm at or above that 321 hour average, based on 8000 yearly miles driving and 25mph average rate gives 320 hours, not including whatever I do in rental cars. On the other hand, we have made a choice to do driving vacations the last few years, racking up 1200 miles at a go; that driving at least brings much greater rewards than the drive to work! ETA: Average people get 120 hours of vacation?

We spent one of our last days at Maria Island, just off the east coast of Tasmania. It was a beautiful, uninhabited island, with tons of amazing scenery. I've narrowed down our pictures to a few of the best.

Here are more shots from Tasmania, this time from Jeff's camera in much more detail! The first set is from Cradle Mountain on our rainy, cool full day there, where Jeff found some cool rain drops and lichen. Then we visited the Tamar Valley Wetlands near Launceston and enjoyed a lovely walk. Finally, there are a few shots of neat insects from Windsong B&B where we stayed on the east coast of Tasmania.

The Great Ocean Road travels along the coast of Victoria to the west of Melbourne. It's an area of amazing beauty and contrasts, well loved by tourists. We enjoyed the dramatic ocean views as well as the wildlife. Jeff got some amazing photos along the way.

We took a lovely cruise on the Murray River, between the border of Victoria and New South Wales, courtesy of Kingfisher Cruises. It was a fun trip exploring a shallow river area with a wide mix of birds.

For the second half of our tour around Tasmania, we went to Freycinet National Park, which was absolutely gorgeous. Had a great hike up to view Wineglass Bay, and then visited other bays and areas of the park. We also stayed not to far away at Windsong B&B. We then spent a day on the tiny Maria Island enjoying being away from people and cars. For the last day, we explored the Royal Tasmania Botanical Garden in Hobart.

The first half of our Tasmania visit. The first part is all at Cradle Mountain where we explored many trails. This was the only truly cold day of our trip, but we still saw many beautiful places on our hikes, and wombats, echidnas and wallabies in the wild. There's also pictures here from the beautiful Cataract Gorge in Launceston.

We started out the next part of our trip in Werribee, where friends live, and they took us to the Werribee Open Range Zoo, run by the Melbourne Zoo. There you can ride in a bus around the safari area, seeing plenty of mainly African animals along the way. You can also walk around other areas and explore other animals. They also took us to other sites in Werribee. The next day we wandered around the entire Melbourne Zoo, which is quite an amazing place.